I wouldn't call it a problem as my system works perfectly at the moment, it's more of an irregularity. I was tidying up the internals of my system today, basically making sure that cables were out of the way of anything that moved or generated heat. I'm paranoid like that. Anyway, I pulled out the long separated one that came with the system (held together by black material) because it was longer than it needed to be, and fitted my own shorter cable. I didn't use the other one that came with the Shuttle, the one with the fancy handle, because it shattered the first time I used it.

When I tried to boot, it blue screened just as the Windows 2000 logo came up. The error was INACCESSABLE_BOOT_DEVICE. I'd had this problem before, and I'd thought it was my HDD jumper settings. Apparently not - I hadn't changed them. I tried changing back the IDE cable, and it worked again. I retried the offending cable, and another one I had lying around, and both resulted in a blue screen. They were in the right way, I triple-checked both. I should mention that the two offenders only have two connectors, whereas the working one has the usual three.

Is this a common problem? Last time, it didn't seem to happen when I had Windows 2000 installed on its own, it only started blue screening when I installed SP3 (latest version at the time). Also, I tried to install XP, which also blue screened. I haven't tried XP since I got it working, but I assume it would work.

Depending on how the cables are wired internally, you may need to change the jumpering on the drive itself. If the drive is jumpered for Master/Single, try jumpering it for Cable Select instead (and vice versa).